One of the good things to have come out of the recent general election is that commentators have been nudged into extending their usual range of historical reference. For far too long, the politics of the relatively uncomplicated two-party system structured both academic and journalistic commentaries on current affairs, each party with its only slightly less uncomplicated class orientation. Even the emergence of the nationalist parties and the Liberal revival in 1974 produced no more than a slight wobble in the otherwise pendulum-like transfer of power from Tories to Labour and back again.

And although since then election campaigns have generated a cascade of words on the prospects of the centre party and speculation about the possibilities of a hung parliament, those have remained until now just that – speculation – to be set aside as soon as the votes were counted and the usual politics of two-party government-and-opposition could resume.

If we learn to think back past the Labour landslide of 1945 and this recent, perhaps anomalous, period of two-party politics that it inaugurated, a couple of things stand out. One is that co-operation in government between Tories and Liberals looks a lot more like the norm rather than the exception.

Pick a year at random in the half century, 1895-1945, and there's a two-thirds chance that it'll be one in which both Conservative and Liberal ministers sat in the same cabinet. In 1895, Lord Salisbury offered four places in his cabinet to Joseph Chamberlain's Liberal Unionists.

Liberal prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith brought Conservatives into his wartime government in 1915, and, after he fell from power at the end of the following year, the next ministry was a largely Conservative affair, though still headed by a Liberal, David Lloyd George.

That government continued into the postwar years – with George Osborne's recent budget evoking memories of the notorious "Geddes Axe" that was swung in an attempt to bring the public finances under control after spending ratcheted upwards during the war years.

After the Tory backbenchers brought down the coalition in 1922, the Liberals were out of power for almost a decade. But when the second Labour government fell in 1931, there were always Liberals in the cabinet of the Tory-heavy National governments of the 1930s – most notably Sir John Simon as foreign secretary (1931-5), home secretary (1935-7) and chancellor (1937-40), continuing in office as lord chancellor under Winston Churchill during the second world war.

The other thing that stands out is that over the longer run it was always the Tories who benefited most from these arrangements. The Liberal Unionists had about 70 MPs in the decade 1895-1905, but by 1912 they had been formally absorbed into the new Conservative and Unionist party. After the coalition fell in 1922, Stanley Baldwin's Tories dominated interwar politics, Lloyd George never held office again, and an ambitious coalition Liberal like Churchill had to return to the Tory fold in order to continue his ministerial career. And the Liberal Nationals of the 1930s became the National Liberals of the 1940s, becoming increasingly assimilated into the day-to-day life of the Conservatives, from whom they eventually became indistinguishable. When Michael Heseltine first stood for parliament in Gower in 1959, it was as a National Liberal candidate.

Far from entering an unprecedented era of new politics, then, Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats are treading a well-worn path. And one question raised by this whistle-stop tour of previous collaborations between Liberals and Conservatives in government is whether history will be any kinder to the Lib Dems' hopes of continuing in existence as an effective, independent political force beyond the lifespan of the present coalition than it was to those of their Liberal Unionist, Lloyd George Liberal, and Liberal National predecessors?

One reason for thinking that the Lib Dems might be luckier is that, this time around, the party has gone into office in a reasonably united fashion. At these earlier political moments, Liberal politics was structured around divisions between the followers of Gladstone and Chamberlain, Asquith and Lloyd George, or, in the 1930s, between Lloyd George's "independents" and two distinct groups of Liberal Nationals around Simon and party leader Sir Herbert Samuel; and it was always factions, splinters or cliques that went into government with the Tories, never the whole Liberal party all together.

Today there are senior Liberal Democrats – notably Shirley Williams and Charles Kennedy – who are clearly less than enthusiastic about participating in the coalition. So far, they have been kept on board by the leadership, and there is no sign of any open or organised revolt just yet. But under the pressures of the politics of retrenchment, the splits are more or less bound to come, and the Conservatives will then work to pull significant chunks of the fragmenting Liberal elite into an ever-closer orbit, as they've done so successfully in the past. Insofar as history has lessons to teach, one of them is this: that Liberals shouldn't go into government with Conservatives and think that they will emerge from the experience unscathed. Rather, they should expect to be swallowed up altogether, or else chewed up pretty thoroughly, and then spat out.

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